Saving the World, One Bike Ride at a Time

Bicycles have come a long way in recent years, evolving from machines that were just fun to ride, to actually making waves as humanitarian vehicles. These two-wheeled heroes are improving quality of life the world over, in everything from life-saving ambulance services to improving childhood literacy, while new bike inventions are making roads safer for cyclists.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Providing Access to Medical CareMountain2Mountain founder Shannon Galpin has seen firsthand how bikes help lower child mortality rates in Afghanistan by enabling midwives to travel between villages. “In Afghanistan, female midwives are the only ones who can deliver babies,” she says. “A doctor can't do it. If you can get midwives on bikes, you will increase their accessibility to provide medical care.”

“Biking is an incredibly cheap form of transportation,” she adds. "You can get kids to school even if their village doesn't have a school. You increase access for education with fewer resources.”

With a little R+D funding though, bikes can take on even bigger responsibilities. In July, a high-end version of a cargo bike ambulance was shown at the New Designer Show in London. Transportation-focused charity Transaid worked with Bournemouth University Product Design student Douglas Powell to improve the design of the non-profit’s bike ambulance trailer, which it uses in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa.

Supplying Free, Clean Energy Laundry is now an excuse to put in extra hours on the bike. The latest iteration of bicycle-powered laundry—the BiWa, which cleans your clothes as you ride—was recently featured on design blog Tuvie. The BiWa is still in the design process, but if it works, you might save water and electricity while burning calories.

Can’t wait for it to hit the market? You can make your own bike generator to power household appliances (reference Saul Lopez’s directions on DIY site Instructables) or visit Windmille Pointe Brewing Company, a brewery that’s partially stationary bike-powered.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Cleaning the Streets and Creating Jobs Worldbike, a non-profit bike design and distribution company based in California, aims to improve the livelihoods of the rural poor with bicycles, and one of its bigger projects involves using cargo bikes to haul trash in Kenya. Eight million Kenyans live in “informal settlements” that lack municipal cleaning services, and trash, in addition to the water it pollutes and rodents and insects it attracts, has become a major hurdle to development. Locals wanted to move trash away from individual dwellings and settlements, but a lack of roads (and the prohibitive cost of cars) made that nearly impossible—until Worldbike collaborated with UN Habitat to look at cargo bikes as potential trash haulers. Worldbike also uses cargo bikes in developing countries to transport people, assist in medical care, and improve access to education.

Improving Literacy Books can change lives: Just ask Matthew Portel, who runs Rides for Reading, a charity that uses bikes to deliver books in low-income school districts. Book lending options exist as well; increasingly-popular mobile bike libraries, like Street Books in Portland, Oregon, enable people to borrow books without venturing to a local library. Literacy on bikes? Awesome.

Protecting Cyclists in the Streets Cycling can sometimes be a dangerous sport in the US, especially when you ride in high-traffic areas. A few recent technology-based developments have begun mitigating that danger, but there’s still a long road ahead. Most recently, a new sonar was developed to allow cyclists to measure the distance between them and cars; most states require a car to pass with at least three feet of room around the cyclist, so this is a way to measure whether drivers actually follow the rules. In Tennessee, one cop is using a combination of bike sonar and a GoPro to catch motorists passing unsafely, then pulling them over and educating them on the traffic laws. And because theft protection is always an issue, mini-GPS units called TrackerPads are becoming more and more popular in tracking stolen rides.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Bicycling participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.